Celebrate Passover With George Michael, Darius Rucker And Bad Brains

Posted 03/30/2010 11:00:36 am
by Kyle Anderson.

Monday evening (March 29) began the annual feast of Passover, a key event for Jewish people around the world. The holiday is set aside to commemorate the Hebrews’ escape from enslavement in Egypt. (Secondarily, it also celebrates the onset of spring and the new harvest.) There are any number of traditions surrounding the holiday depending on where you are in the world and what particular brand of Judaism you practice, but it centers around the Passover seder, a traditional meal that is also used as a stage for retelling the Biblical story of Exodus.

As with any festive celebration (especially one that involves this much wine drinking), Passover needs a handful of tunes to get into the spirit of the day. Hence the following video playlist that focuses on the themes of the holiday and the story wrapped up in it. There’s Good Charlotte‘s “Festival Song,” two tracks about plagues (as the story goes, God sent 10 plagues to inflict the Pharaoh’s people as a means of setting the Hebrews free) and plenty of songs about rising up to overcome adversity (like Bad Brains‘ “Rise” and Shadows Fall‘s “Still I Rise”). There’s even Darius Rucker‘s “Exodus,” just for good measure.

But Passover is essentially about freedom, which is why the playlist kicks off with George Michael‘s “Freedom,” an ode to the importance of liberation and to helping the oppressed overcome.